Development and UX from Michael Mahemoff. Maker of Player FM. Previously: Google, BT, O'Reilly author. Also thesis papers.

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I discovered at last minute a developer event on Yahoo! FireEagle at Covent Garden tonight and decided to rush down there. FireEagle is pretty intriguing as the first serious attempt at an OAuth API (though Google Contacts now qualifies too). For me, that was the main draw; but the actual service it offers is also compelling.

What’s FireEagle?

Location based services have been hyped for years. By now, you should be walking around and receiving reviews of local restaurants on your phone, browsing nearby tourist attractions, and seeing which of your friends is in your vicinity. However, it hasn’t caught on. The main reason is stovepipes and walled gardens. Your mobile provider might have an API available, but probably restricted access to a very limited set of developers. A mix of privacy and commercial concerns have rendered this whole area practically useless.

Enter the eagle. FireEagle completely opens up this area, by offering a model that is flexible and open, but without compromising user privacy. It’s an API that essentially tracks one thing: Where in the world are all FireEagle users?

In other words, the FireEagle API allows any client to update a user’s location and any client to retrieve a user’s location. Of course, the user must consent to all this activity, and that’s where OAuth comes in – as a way for users to say, for example, “I trust app abc to update my location and app xyz to read my location”. So FireEagle detaches location providers from location consumers, opening up an entire ecosystem.

What kind of clients act as location updaters? You might think it’s all automated stuff, like mobile devices and IP numbers, but actually many updaters are manual. Here’s a sample:

Mobile phone app. Anyone with the right access details could write a mobile phone app to use cell tower information, built-in GPS, or any other cues, to update location as the user moves around. This is the no-brainer example of an automatic mobile updater.

Twitter. When you tweet with “L: london”, a twitter monitor app could notice that and notify FireEagle. (As with all cases below, you must have authorised the monitor app to do that.) This example illustrates that users aren’t always passive lemmings walking around with a mobile updater app in their pocket. It may be that location data is only ever updated when a user proactively tweets their location.

A client that watches you adding geotagged photos to Flickr, and assumes you are in the last location you uploaded.

Specialised tracker device. Devices based on GPS (e.g. SPOT) could easily be made to update FireEagle with their location.

Car app. Based on GPS, a car’s location could be tracked using FireEagle. (The car, not the driver.)

Privacy

The other thing FireEagle gets right is great concern for privacy – users can give out as much or as little data as they like, and they can stop the service at any time. The first way this happens is with OAuth, which lets you manage which services can perform what actions. You can start and stop this at any time. In the future, there will be a simple client to let you log in from your mobile and control all this. In particular, you will probably be able to suspend all tracking at any time.

Additionally, you can apparently set granularity, so you could expose just a general area, e.g. whiiich city or country you’re in, instead of a particular co-ordinate.

In the future, you will probably be able to authorise a client just for a certain time, e.g. during a conference, after which it can no longer access your data.

At some point, historical data may become available. The team said if this happens, they will allow users to delete and edit their past data.

In summary, the team has been very careful to ensure users have complete control over their own data,

Very Raw Notes from Presentation

Tom Coates is talking about FireEagle.

FireEagle is the old CS classic: a layer of intermediation – between location
identification systems and location consumer systems. As a user, I can tell
FireEagle where I am and any permissioned app can make use of that data.

London is about the most frequent location for fireeagle

What would your existing/past apps look like if they had location services
available?

Spot – specialised comms/phone device for backpackers, aid workers, etc.
~100pound for device, 100pound a year and keeps updating your location everyï¿½
ten minutes. Doesn’t integrate yet but great example if it did

Ambient Orb – e.g. changes colour as you move away

Nabaztag

Geotagging all user generated content – cinema listings, local traffic, local
TV stations, nearby friends, weather forecast, local exchange rates, public
holidays, windspeed. A lot of this is on wikipedia thanks to geotagging.

Friends and family widgets. e.g. where they are in the world, what time it is,
weather, etc. (A gadget for each person.)

Last.FM – On cracked iphone, can get mobile scrobbler on iphone. What if it
recorded where you were, then you could see which songs people play in
particular areas. Cool!

Building an APP

Each consumer key and secret identifies an application using Fire Eagle.

User Authorises ….

There are three models and the difference is purely to do with differences in
(app triggering web page) and (web page triggering app).
Web: Can trigger in both directions
Mobile: Can’t trigger in either direction (maybe, but can’t assume it)
Desktop: App can trigger web page, web page can’t trigger app

Web App model: Request token

I asked which model was used for widgets. Answer: Desktop. (Makes sense, with
current technology. Web model would cause redirection from container. Later on,
Opensocial will have oauth built in.)

Core Concepts

Note: social graph (user and friends) is beyond scope

location – point or bounding box
location hierarchy – set of locations

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The Search Engine Experiment – a blind test where users rate relevance of results – reveals that Google is better, but not that much better. The methodology is reasonable – the only serious flaw might be if people are assuming Google is always relevant, then trying to pick the Google results. Or if people go for Google because they’re used to it, so the results are the most comfortable. For example, when I tried the test, I jumped straight for the results that included wikipedia, partly because it just felt more pure and Googlish. It turned out to be a Yahoo! result.

Anyway, taking the results at face value, how to explain MSN and Yahoo! being more relevant than the grand-daddy of search 60% of the time?Seth has a good theory:

Google is better because it feels better and quicker and leaner and easier to use. The story we tell ourselves about Google is very different, and we use it differently as a result … Music sounds better through an iPod because we think it does.

Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it.

My first reaction was, “But the user’s always right!” If users think it’s clean, then it’s clean by definition. And it is users who sing Google’s praises, not just the usabilerati.

But when you think about all of Google’s other services, how many people really use Google for anything other than search? I bet people use a lot more of Yahoo’s services.

Take another careful look at Google’s front page. Want a map? You have to click once to be offered the choice, then a second additional time to get to the map page. Want to use Google Scholar to check references? Um, well, is that “Advanced Search” or “more.” What about their newly announced blog search? Why is Google maps separate from Google Earth? (Oh, those were purchased from different companies. Yes, but why should I, the user, care about the history of Google’s acquisitions?)

All of these things require you to click on “more” which gets you to the options page where there are 29 alternatives, plus links to “About Google,” “Help Center” (if Google is really so simple, why does one need help?), “Downloads” and then a special section on “web search features,” which has another 24 links of web features, a book search toolbar, and then another 23 sections of text â€” not links, text descriptions and an entire meta-language you can learn to improve the searches.

This made me think, why isn’t Google of all people playing the URL as command-line game with their own products? Sample searches:

“groups” – Yahoo Groups first, Google Groups 2nd.

“map” – MapQuest first, Google Maps 7th (Google Moon 90-something).

“news” – BBC first, Google News 5th.

“images” – YES! Google finally made it to no. 1! (Quick, get the SEO lawyers, Google’s cracked the Google algorithm!)

Now, this is all very nice and integral of Google to provide honest results rather than sprinkle in their own services. But what gets me is that they often provide no relevant link to their own service. I wouldn’t expect Google to show all of their services on the homepage, but I would expect it to point me to Google Maps when I search for “map”. And when I search for “Paris Map”, it’s nice that Google offers some images in the results, but I can think of something more relevant.

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G’Day

Welcome to Michael Mahemoff's blog, soapboxing on software and the web since 2004. I'm presently using HTML5 and the web to make podcasts easier to share, play, and discover at Player FM. I've previously worked at Google and Osmosoft, and built the Ajax Patterns wiki and corresponding book, "Ajax Design Patterns" (O'Reilly 2006).
For avoidance of doubt, I'm not a female, nor ever have been to my knowledge. The title of this blog alludes to English As She Is Spoke, a book so profoundly flawed it reminded me of the maturity of the software industry when this blog began in 2004. I believe the industry has become more sophisticated since then, particularly the importance of UX.
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